Alice the

Child-Imperialist
and the
Games of Wonderland
DANIEL BIVONA

67j8EW would dispute the claim that Lewis

Carroll was fascinatedby games and
puzzles. His interestin logical and mathematicalgames has been
well documented. Moreover, although he seems rarely to have
turned his attentionto politics,on at least one occasion when he
did-at the time of the Parliamentarydebate over the Second
Irish Home Rule Bill-he took a characteristicdelightin reducing
this heated political debate to a puzzle. In fact, his "Home-Rule
Mystery"was just one of many Home-Rule puzzles and games
introduced to the English market in the months followingGlad-
stone's introductionof the Bill in Februaryof 1893.'
A man who could constructa parlor game out of an emo-
tional political issue must, one imagines, have had an extraordi-
narily detached outlook on politics. Yet one need not be overly
surprised that Carroll could find the imaginativematerial for a
puzzle in the debate over Ireland's place in the Empire. Indeed,
a close look at his earlier classic,Alice'sAdventuresin Wonderland,
reveals a fascinationon his part with the imaginativepossibilities
latentin a "confrontationof cultures"-the kind of encounterthat

C 1986 by The Regents of the Universityof California

ISee Dodgson's referencesto his puzzle in lettersto Mrs. G. J. Burch and R.
H. Collins in 1893, in The Lettersof Lewis Carroll,ed. Morton N. Cohen, 2 vols.
(New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1979), II, 962, 969-70.

143
144 NINETEENTH-CENTURY LITERATURE

the imperial experience of the nineteenthcenturywas bringing

to the forefrontof European consciousness. In this work Carroll
seems to have been intriguedby the same kind of dilemma that
firedthe imaginationof Swift,a writerwithanythingbut a purely
playfulintellectualinterestin politicalissues: what happens when
one deposits a representativeof English culture in a foreignland
populated by beings who live by unfamiliarrules? In short,it is
time to examine Alice's relationship to imperialismbecause the
dilemma in which she findsherselfseems designed to raise ques-
tionsabout her "imperial"assumptionthatall discoursesare either
commensurableor can be made to seem SO.2 In Alice,
self-evidently
Carroll renders a world organized by gamelike social structures
in which masteryof the game promises masteryof others.3

21 am extrapolatingRichard Rorty'snotion of "incommensurablediscourses"

here by applying it to Alice's failed attemptto "read" the meaning of the "crea-
tures'" words and actions by imposing an interpretiveschema which is nothing
other than her own English conventionalityhypostatizedinto a metasystemor
metalanguage. Rortyargues that "epistemology"performsan analogous trickby
attemptingto render all discourses translatablethrough imposing its own set of
favored terms: "There is no such thing as the 'language of unified science.' We
have not got a language which will serve as a permanent neutral matrixfor for-
mulatingall good explanatoryhypotheses,and we have not the foggiestnotion of
how to get one.... So epistemology-as the attemptto render all discoursescom-
mensurable by translatingthem into a preferredset of terms-is unlikelyto be a
useful strategy"(Philosophy and theMirrorof Nature [Princeton: Princeton Univ.
Press, 1979], pp. 348-49). Many criticshave discussed Lewis Carroll's obsession
withrules and rule-governedbehavior. Indeed, one mightargue that some of the
best criticismof Alice'sAdventuresin Wonderland has focused on his interestin games
and play, whether it be Kathleen Blake's discussion of the play/workdichotomy
(both of which spheres of experience Carroll is said to place in a rule-governed
context)or Roger Henkle's identificationof Carroll's timidproposal of "free play"
as an alternativeto a mid-Victorianlife of stultifying, repressive,rule-governed
work.See Kathleen Blake, Play, Games,and Sport:The LiteraryWorksofLewisCarroll
(Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1974), p. 88, and Roger B. Henkle, "The Mad
Hatter's World," VirginiaQuarterlyReview,49 (1973), 102-3. The standard work
treating the creatures as spokesmen for various sorts of nonsense is Elizabeth
Sewell's The Field ofNonsense(London: Chatto and Windus, 1952). In contrast,my
positionis thatwhat appears to be "nonsense" in Aliceis simply"sense" of an alien
kind. Lest it be objected thatI am overlookingthe obvious factthatthe "creatures"
speak "English" words here, it is worthmaking the point that such may simplybe
Carroll's concession to the needs of an English-speakingreadership. Afterall, no
modern viewer of a Hollywood World War II filmmistakesthe Japanese soldiers
depicted in it for Americans simplybecause the director has them speaking En-
glish.
3Blake, Play, Games,and Sport,p. 16. Blake's book is by far the best critical
ALICE THE CHILD-IMPERIALIST 145
An "ethnographic"approach to Alice's adventures is autho-
rized by the fact that Alice is placed in a world that appears to
be, at least potentially,rule-governed,although the rules thatgive
meaning to the behavior of the creaturesare beyond her ken and
must be discovered by inference. To put it another way, more
often than not, what would be "natural" behavior in an English
settingis inappropriate in Wonderland; the social codes that de-
terminewhat is or is not "natural" are very differentin the two
spheres. Moreover,as Kathleen Blake has argued, language itself
is viewed as a kind of game here:

To Huizinga,to thelinguistFerdinandde Saussure,and ... to Car-

of reciprocally
rolltoo,languageitselfis a gamelikesystem accepted
termsand rules,arbitrary, meaningfulonly by social agreement.
Fromthispointof viewa realmwithoutgamesis hard to imagine.

However, rules take on an even greater importance in this

text than Blake will allow because, paradoxically,theyare so dif-
ficultto infer.Not only is it difficultto imagine a realm without
games, but the very notion that there might be a realm of ex-
perience notgoverned by rules is rendered highlyproblematicin
Alice. The text leaves indeterminate-so, one could say, does
"life"-the question of whether or not all spheres of social exis-
tence conform to a canon of laws of one sort or another.5Thus
the commonplace criticalassumption that rule violationcan pro-

discussion of play as masteryin Carroll. Relying especially on Jean Piaget and

Johan Huizinga, Blake sees play as an active drive to incorporate: "Play-spon-
taneous, disinterested,nonutilitarian-is characterized by a fundamentalurge to
masterythroughincorporationof experience to the ego ratherthan byadjustment
or accommodation of the ego to experience" (p. 18). This definition,however,
disqualifiesmuch of Alice's experience in Wonderland frominclusionin the realm
of play: Alice's attemptsto masterthe "creatures"by inferringthe rules governing
their "games" are thwartedat almost every turn, even though her growthspurts
do affordher occasional opportunitiesto bullythe "creatures."Bullying,however,
is hardly what Blake means by "playing the game."
4Blake, Play, Games,and Sport,p. 16.
5ThroughtheLooking-Glass very clearly raises (withoutanswering) the question
of what sort of controllingrationalitygoverns Alice's "moves" on the chessboard.
See Roger B. Henkle, "Carroll's Narratives Underground: 'Modernism' and
Form," in Lewis Carroll:A Celebration, ed. Edward Guiliano (New York: Clarkson
N. Potter,1982), pp. 92-93.
146 NINETEENTH-CENTURY LITERATURE

vide a clue to unmask the semioticstructureof the Wonderland

world is rendered doubtful by the very fact that no one, and es-
pecially Alice, can honestlyclaim to have privilegedaccess to the
rules governingthe behavior of the "creatures,"and lacking such
access, cannot decide such central questions as to whetheror not
the "creatures" are engaged in competitivegames or other non-
competitiveactivitiessuch as rituals.
Perhaps nowhere is this more obvious than in the Queen's
croquet match, in which Alice's confidence that she knows the
boundaries of the game of croquet leads her to assume that she
can easily -distinguishorderly behavior from disorderly, rule-
observingfromrule-breaking,sense fromnonsense, behavior that
is part of the game-say, hittingthe hedgehogs withflamingos-
frombehavior thatintrudeson the game frombeyond itsbounds,
for instance, the Queen's awful command, "Off with his head!"
However, Alice's confidence in her ability to distinguishinside
from outside is but a sign of her own unexamined ethnocentric
outlook.
Alice recognizes, but only to a limited extent, what her in-
ferentialtask mustbe. We know,for instance,thatshe is especially
concerned with correctlyinferringrules from the strange behav-
ior she sees around her, and thisconcern of hers extends even to
herself: her own physical stature is determined by her following
writtenrules. One of her firstorders of businessafterfallingdown
the rabbit hole (uninvited,of course; her adventure begins as an
intrusioninto the White Rabbit's home in complete disregard of
even her own English canon of politeness) is to attemptto shrink
herself;yet this shrinkingis enabled only by her having followed
the instructionswrittenon the label attached to a bottleof liquid:
"DRINK ME."6 The stakes in this game of rule inferenceare rather
high, Alice knows, at least at this point in the narrative,because
one's bodily integrityis somehow tied to one's abilityto follow
rules successfully:"For she had read several nice little stories
about chidren who had got burnt, and eaten up by wild beasts,
and other unpleasant things,all because theywouldnot remember

6Lewis Carroll, The AnnotatedAlice:Alice'sAdventures

in Wonderland, introd. and
notes by Martin Gardner (New York: Clarkson N. Potter,1960), p. 31. Hereafter,
referencesto this edition appear in parentheses in the body of the text.
ALICE THE CHILD-IMPERIALIST 147
the simple rules their friends had taught them" (p. 31). Alice's
assumption that bodily shape is somehow connected to following
rules is not as odd as it mightsound, given the preoccupation of
Alice'sAdventures in Wonderland with the waysin which systemsof
rules constructbehavioral norms for what is "natural." Bodies are
not recognized here until they are named, that is, classified;but
even then, misrecognitionis an ever present pitfallbecause of the
lack of a universalcode. Bodies are as closelylinked to the semiotic
structureof the Wonderland social systemas are the "events" in
whichAlice participates.Alice's use of the term"creatures"-both
an insultingterm that diminishes the Wonderland beings and a
class name that raises questions about their place in the scale of
creation (are they animal or human?)-renders their fuzzilyin-
determinatestatus: to her they are, perhaps, merely animate or
''animated."
In the case of Wonderland social "events,"the resemblance
between their Wonderland names and the names of events in
nineteenth-century England mislead Alice into mistakenlyassim-
ilating them to those familiar to her. For instance, the famous
"caucus-race" in which Alice finds herself involved bears few of
the featuresan English public schoolboywould associate withrac-
ing: the shape of the race course seems arbitrarilydesigned; the
contestantsdo not line up together;and the "race" has no clearly
defined beginning or ending in time (p. 48). The fact that the
event ends with all contestantsdeclared winners and all handed
prizes suggeststhat it is not a contestat all, an inferencejustified
by its name: the word "caucus," at the time a relativelyrecent
linguisticimport into Victorian England from the United States,
carries the implication of a meeting to iron out differencesin
order to present a united frontfor exerting political pressure, a
local game of politicalaccommodation withina larger adversarial
context rather than a contest with winners and losers.7 If there

7See the OED definitionof the use of "caucus" in England: "In English news-
papers since 1878, generally misused, and applied opprobriouslyto a committee
or organization charged with seeking to manage the elections and dictate to the
constituencies,but which is, in fact,usually a representativecommitteepopularly
elected for the purpose of securing concerted political action in a constituency"
(The CompactEditionof theOxfordEnglishDictionary, 2 vols. [Oxford: Oxford Univ.
Press, 1971], I, 350). Obviously, the popular nineteenth-century Britishview of
148 NINETEENTH-CENTURY LITERATURE

are to be "losers," they exist outside of the caucus, not within

it. In fact, the entire "race" aspect of the "caucus-race" is de-
emphasized in favor of the ceremonyof awarding prizes, a ritual
which even Alice is forced, quite against her initial impulse, to
observe with a show of outward solemnity(p. 50).
The eventis significantbecause it raises the same crucial ques-
tion about Alice's problems of interpretationthroughout her
Wonderland adventure. Rituals,like games, are rule-governedso-
cial events; unlike games, however,ritualsare seldom held for the
purpose of sortingout winnersfromlosers. Obviously,the whole
notion of a "winner"is irrelevantto most ritual events. But Alice
fails miserablyat this central hermeneutictask of sortingout rit-
uals fromgames in Wonderland because the names of the events
misleadinglyobscure the importantdifferencesbetweenthe "large
events" here and the events bearing the same names in English
life.
Alice's inabilityto make these distinctionsis the kind of my-
opia thatwilleventuallyresultin her complete disruptionof Won-
derland societyin a fitof almost "missionary"zealotryat the end
of the book. Thus, not surprisingly,her entrance into the garden
and onto the Queen's "Croquet-Ground," another of her many
intrusions,is preceded by a vow that takes on a rather sinister
appearance when seen in this light: "I'll manage betterthis time"
(p. 104). What she "manages" is to assimilate the game of Won-
derland "croquet" into her own English versionof croquet,judge
the Wonderland versionto be an impossibleversionof the English
one, and completelymisinterpretthe significanceof the Queen's
infamouscommand "Off withhis head!" as an event thatintrudes
on the game from beyond its structureof rules, despite the evi-

the meaning of the word is evoked here on the level of appearances: the Dodo
does seemto stage-manage the "race." My point, however,is simplythat because
Alice lacks an interpretiveframeworkforjudging whetheror not the "creatures"
are actuallyimprovisingwhen they appear to be (there is no universal code that
allows people to make definitivejudgments about whetherinhabitantsof foreign
cultures they know nothingabout are improvisingor strictlyfollowingrigid rules
laid down in antiquity),the American sense of the word "caucus" offersitselfas
one plausible sense of the word "caucus" here, especially in light of the other
compelling evidence against assimilatingthe Wonderland "caucus-race" to the En-
glish notion of a "race."
ALICE THE CHILD-IMPERIALIST 149
dence that it may well be an event withinthe "game" rather than
outsideit.
Although Wonderland "croquet" does bear some superficial
resemblance to the English game (takingout the garbage bears a
superficialresemblance to checkersas well, if one views the event
from a certain angle and allows for differencesof scale), Alice is
convinced that she can compete successfully,even when she be-
comes frustratedwith the difficulty.Characteristically,her exas-
peration soon boils over into the childish assumption, not that it
is a difficultgame, but that it is a game withoutrules. As she tells
the Cheshire Cat,

"I don'tthinktheyplayat all fairly... and theyall quarrelso dread-

fullyone can'thearoneselfspeak-and theydon'tseemto haveany
rulesin particular:at least,if thereare, nobodyattendsto them-
and you'veno idea howconfusingit is all the thingsbeingalive."
(p. 113)

Alice has no vantage from which to judge whetherthe creatures

are followingor breaking the rules. In circular fashion she infers
thatthere are rules fromthe factthatshe has just been struggling
to play by them correctly;moreover, her assumption that this
Wonderland "game" of "croquet" is identifiablewith the English
version is a doubtful one, given the fact that the Wonderland
event is one which one of the players,the Queen, cannot "lose."
Her leap to the conclusion that there are "no rules" governing
this event on the Queen's croquet ground is merelyone of many
instances in the text wherein her exasperation with her own ig-
norance or lack of skillis projected onto the "creatures."Alice has
an imperial penchant for producing her own self-justifying evi-
dence as well as an exasperating (although understandablyhu-
man) tendencyto rationalize her own failuresof comprehension.
Thus, Alice's judgment that the Queen's execution orders
make her "savage" ("Mad Tea-Party") comes from her too-com-
fortableapplication of the rules of English croquet to the Won-
derland game. Althoughshe notes thatno one ever seems actually
to get beheaded (p. 112), she is incapable of processing the im-
plications of that observation. The "order" "Off with his head!"
does not seem to be a performativein the Wonderland linguistic
universe (nor, for that matter,does the Duchess's "Chop off her
150 NINETEENTH-CENTURY LITERATURE

head!" in the "Pig and Pepper" chapter); but because Alice has
only her own English frameworkon which to fall back, she as-
sumes that it must carry performativeforce. A more reasonable
inferencewould be that the Queen's "savage" order is actually a
part of the game ratherthan an event that intrudesfromoutside
the game. After all, Alice does notice that the King pardons all
those the Queen has condemned. Alice mighthave more reason-
ably inferred from that fact that the event called "croquet" in
Wonderland is actually a ritual intended to reinforcethe power
of the King and Queen over life and death, possiblyby enacting
a pageant of condemnationfollowedby forgiveness.Not only does
this inferencehelp explain the strange fact that no one in Won-
derland is ever beheaded, but by identifyingthe event as a ritual,
one accounts for the odd fact that this "game" is a game that one
player cannot lose. However, such an inferencewould require of
Alice the flexibilityto assign differentboundaries to the "game"
of Wonderland croquet.
My intentin offeringthis interpretationis not to insiston a
unitary decoding of the behavior of the "creatures," nor, tire-
somely, to take Alice to task for childish naivete. Other equally
reasonable explanationsmightbe adduced to account forthe same
evidence. My point is that Alice's assumption that Wonderland
"croquet" is a competitivegame says more about her own eth-
nocentrismthan it does about the behavior of the "creatures."
Carroll has constructeda world that is radicallyindeterminate,a
world from which most of the "frames"that guide perception of
the meaning of events,"frames"usually unreflectively assumed by
Victorianchildren(or adults, forthatmatter),have been removed.
One needs to know the langue as well as the parole,the systemas
well as the individual gesture that has meaning only withinthat
system,to make valid inferencesabout the meaning of eventsand
behavior. Alice's "imperialism,"such as it is, is a semiotic impe-
rialism:she is incapable of constructing,on a model radicallydif-
ferentfromher own, the "system"or "systems"thatgive meaning
to the behavior of the creatures.8

8The twobest criticalstudies of the Alzcebooks to insiston the possibly"logical"

(i.e., "rule-governed") basis for the "creatures'" behavior are George Pitcher,
"Wittgenstein,Nonsense, and Lewis Carroll,"Massachusetts Review,6, Pt. 2 (1965),
ALICE THE CHILD-IMPERIALIST 151
Alice's encounterwiththe hookah-smokingcaterpillarunder-
lines the kind of invasiveintrudershe has become in Wonderland.
The hookah, itselfa stock "orientalizing"feature, highlightsthe
caterpillar'sforeignness;and the tautologicalturn that theircon-
versation takes demonstrates,not that the caterpillar is incorri-
giblyillogical,but rather that he refuses to be comprehended by
Alice's categories of meaning. In this instance Alice attemptsto
read the caterpillar'sfeelings by analogy with her own in order
to impose her own feelingson him (a gesturesimultaneouslynaive
and imperious). He should feel that physical metamorphosis is
"veryconfusing"because she has. Of course, where metamorpho-
sis is the norm, the illusion of stasis would "feel very queer," so
another sign of Alice's naivete is the fact that she has it all wrong
here. When the caterpillarresistsher attemptto comprehend his
experience, "Not a bit" (p. 68), she immediatelyresorts to her
favoriteform of aggression-making herselflook larger:

591-611, and PatriciaMeyer Spacks, "Logic and Language in ThroughtheLooking-

Glass," in Aspectsof Alice,ed. Robert Phillips (London: Gollancz, 1972), pp. 267-
75. Pitcher usefullynotes that the text foregroundsAlice's problems of rule in-
ferencewhile demonstratingthatCarroll plays withnotions analogous to the "lan-
guage-games" of which Wittgensteinwould write years later, although he is not
concerned in this essay with attemptingto recuperate any of the "creatures"'
games as "sensible." In her essay, Spacks argues that Carroll satirizes,through
Alice, the illogical everydayuse of language, or perhaps more appropriately,the
illogicalityof those who, like Alice, attemptto fiteverydaylanguage into the de-
mands of logical rigor.See also Gilles Deleuze, "The Schizophrenicand Language:
Surface and Depth in Lewis Carroll and Antonin Artaud," in TextualStrategies:
Perspectivesin Post-Structuralist
Criticism,ed. Josu6 V. Harari (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell
Univ. Press, 1979) for the interestingcontrast he draws between Carroll's stark
depictionof the linguistic"surface"and Artaud's "howl,"whichdefeatsall attempts
to recuperate it withina linguisticsystemof meaning. Deleuze argues: "Without
this surface that distinguishesitselffrom the depths of bodies, withoutthis line
that separates things from propositions,sounds would become inseparable from
bodies, becoming simple physicalqualities contiguous withthem,and propositions
would be impossible. This is why theorganizationof language is notseparablefrom
thepoeticdiscovery ofsurface,or fromAlice's adventure. The greatnessof language
consists in speaking only at the surface of things,and therebyin capturing the
pure event and the combinationsof events that take place on the surface. It be-
comes a question of reascending to the surface,of discoveringsurface entitiesand
their games of meaning and of non-sense, of expressing these games in port-
manteau words, and of resistingthe vertigo of the bodies' depths and their ali-
mentary,poisonous mixtures"(pp. 284-85).
152 NINETEENTH-CENTURY LITERATURE

"Well,perhapsyourfeelingsmaybe different," said Alice: "all

I knowis, it wouldfeelveryqueer to me."
"You!" said theCaterpillarcontemptuously."Whoare you?"
Whichbroughtthemback again to thebeginningof thecon-
versation.
Alicefelta littleirritated makingsuch
at theCaterpillar's
veryshortremarks, and she drewherselfup and said,verygravely,
"I thinkyououghtto tellme whoyouare, first." (p. 68)

In the quasi-Hegelian game of "comprehension"thatis being

played out here, Alice's frustrationwith her inabilityto compre-
hend the experience of the caterpillar(he who closes the circle of
the tautologydefeats the other's attemptto know him) causes her
to resortto literalizingwhat she is talkingabout: she triesto look
as if she is larger than he. The pun on "short"shiftsthe discourse
back to a literal surface, and Alice attemptsto grow to meet the
caterpillar's-challenge, the challenge of incomprehensibility, by
bullying.But the disjunctionin the textbetween"comprehending"
and "growinglarger than" (Alice knows least when she is the larg-
est, as in the White Rabbit's house, where she cannot perceive
what is going on outside, or at the end of the trial when she
surrendersall hope of understandingthe event in favor of pure
disruption)is reinforcedin this passage, and suggeststhatCarroll
is underminingthe Hegelian equation of "comprehension" with
knowledge-precisely the equation which Alan Sandison notes
underlies the epistemological form of nineteenth-century impe-
rialism.9"Growing"becomes a poor substitutefor "knowing"here,
and its insufficiency inevitablydraws Alice into a game of violent
disruption. Growing is both Alice's substitutefor the object of
knowledge that she cannot successfullyappropriate, and a sign of
her incomprehension-thus, the disjunction.
To Hegel, of course, the route to knowledge is via appro-
priation: the highest form of consciousness is self-consciousness,
but self-consciousnessthat is recognized by an other.'0Justas the
philosopher writingthe Phenomenology ofMind in his studywithin
hearing range of Napoleon's guns at the Battle of Jena "compre-

9The WheelofEmpire(New York: St. Martin's Press, 1967), pp. 59-60.

'0"Self-consciousnessexists in itselfand for itself,in that,and by the fact that
it exists for another self-consciousness;that is to say, it is only by being acknowl-
edged or 'recognized'" (G.W.F. Hegel, ThePhenomenology ofMind, trans.J. B. Bail-
lie, 2nd ed. (New York: Harper and Row, 1967), p. 229.
ALICE THE CHILD-IMPERIALIST 153
hends" the world-historicalfigureof Napoleon by constructinga
historythat includes him in a teleological process culminatingin
Hegel's own moment of writing,so Alice must grow to "compre-
hend" that which she would know; although, as already men-
tioned, the few times she does experience "growth"in Wonder-
land take her away from self-consciousness-knowledge-rather
than toward it." Alice's strugglefor recognitionby the creatures,
her will-to-master, drives her beyond any bounds of decency (if
therewere any such conceptionof the rules of decency not bound
by constraintsof time,place, and culture). If there is rule violation
in this text,surely Alice is the violatorpar excellence.
The relevance of Hegel's notion of the desire for "recogni-
tion" as the drivingforce behind Alice's will to manage the "crea-
tures" casts some light on some of the more puzzling problems
of identitythat she confronts.Alice perfectlyembodies the He-
gelian paradox of identity,the "doubling" that is at the basis of
his notion of subjectivity.The imperativethat drives the Hegelian
"master" to risk his life for recognitioninvolves him in a kind of
enslavementto the other: he seeks to attain pure "self-conscious-
ness," but "self-consciousness"that is "recognized" by the other,
the "slave,"who is himselfunselfconsciousand fearsto put himself
at risk.'2 Thus Alice's initialsplittingof self in the "Pool of Tears"
episode (she becomes both addresser and addressee of her own
discourse, performerof feats and self-applauder,the measurer

IISelf-consciousness is the next step: for instance,the philosopher's realization

that it is he who "comprehends" Napoleon.
12The master "exists only for himself,that is his essential nature; he is the
negative power withoutqualification,a power to which the thing is naught. And
he is thus the absolutelyessential act in this situation,while the bondsman is not
so, he is an unessential activity.But for recognitionproper there is needed the
moment that what the masterdoes to the other he should also do to himself,and
what the bondsman does to himself,he should do to the other also. On that ac-
count a formof recognitionhas arisen that is one-sided and unequal. In all this,
the unessential consciousness is, for the master,the object which embodies the
truthof his certaintyof himself.But it is evident that this object does not cor-
respond to its notion; for,just where the masterhas effectively achieved lordship,
he reallyfindsthatsomethinghas come about quite differentfroman independent
consciousness. It is not an independent,but rathera dependent consciousnessthat
he has achieved. He is thus not assured of self-existenceas his truth;he findsthat
his truth is rather the unessential consciousness, and the fortuitousunessential
action of that consciousness" (Hegel, The Phenomenology ofMind, pp. 236-37).
154 NINETEENTH-CENTURY LITERATURE

and the measured) fillsthe gap left by a lack of "slaves" to rec-

ognize her and presages the wayin whichshe willtreatthe "other"
when she confrontshim: as a screen on which she may project
her own idea of the other. Not surprisingly,when she meets the
mouse after having fallen into her own pool of tears, she imme-
diately gives offense,"Ou est ma chatte?" And in no time,she is
adding insult to injuryby attemptingforciblyto embrace him in
a false communitywith herself,signaled by her use of the word
"We" (p. 42). The "otherness"of the other is barelyacknowledged
by Alice in this book; yet,paradoxically,recognitionby the other
is preciselywhat she most avidly seeks. All discourse is a species
of oneiric discourse here, as the Hegelian "master's" drive for
recognitionis marked by a condition impossible to satisfy:to be
recognized by the other is implicitlyto reduce the other forcibly
to the condition of recognizingwithouthimselfbeing recognized
in turn; however,the price one pays for being recognized as mas-
ter is the knowledge that the recognizeris not himselfa "master,"
and, ultimately,not one whose recognitionis worthacquiring.
Alice's frustrationwiththe contradictionsinherentin her He-
gelian drive to attain masteryis evident virtuallyeverywhere.She
desires recognitionbut is frustratedwith those who ought to be
according it to her, the mere "creatures"who have the effrontery
to resist her, the beings whose "illogical" games she is incapable
of mastering. Her complaints about how the "creatures" argue,
such as in her confrontationwith the Frog-Footman in the "Pig
and Pepper" chapter, display her propensityto return this frus-
trationby projectingit outward:

"How am I to get in?"asked Aliceagain,in a loudertone.

"Areyou to get in at all?" said the Footman."That'sthe first
question,you know."
It was, no doubt: onlyAlice did not like to be told so. "It's
reallydreadful,"she mutteredto herself,"thewayall thecreatures
argue. It's enoughto driveone crazy!" (p. 81)

Thus, she slides immediatelyfrom the dim recognitionthat she

perhaps has no right of entry into the Duchess's house to the
abrasive assumptionthatthe "creatures"are overlyargumentative
because they too frequentlyfrustrateher will. Her "will-to-mas-
tery" has both these contradictory"subjective" and "objective"
ALICE THE CHILD-IMPERIALIST 155
facets: she is incapable of understandingthe "creatures"because
of her own ethnocentrism,and is frustratedin her attemptsto
get them to recognize her. In some fundamental respects the
"creatures"refuse to engage her at all, neitheracknowledgingher
rightto "read" them in her own ethnocentricway nor surrender-
ing theirrightto "read" her as theyplease. At timesin thisbook,
such as in her confrontationwith the caterpillar,their outright
refusal to be "read" goads her into the bullyinggestures that are
the last resortof one driven to be recognized by those she refuses
to recognize.
with understandingthe referencesof names
Alice's difficulty
casts lighton the disjunctionbetween her own linguisticcategories
and those of the "creatures." She gains a taste of what it is like
to be mistakenlyclassifiedwhen the pigeon calls her, in one of
her long-neckedmoments,a "serpent."The pigeon's "mistake,"if
one might call it that, is one to which Alice is continuallyprey:
the pigeon abstractscertainessentialproperties(long-necked,egg-
eating) and classifiesAlice accordinglywiththe name thatshe uses
for all creatureswho exhibitthose qualities (p. 75). This lesson in
mistaken classification,however,apparently avails Alice nought,
for in the Duchess's house she generatesa great deal of misplaced
sympathyfor the "creature" the Duchess calls "Pig":

"Oh, please mindwhatyou'redoing!"criedAlice,jumpingup

and downin an agonyof terror."Oh, theregoes hispreciousnose!"
as an unusuallylargesaucepanflewclosebyit,and verynearlycar-
ried it off.
"If everybody mindedtheirown business,"the Duchesssaid,
in a hoarsegrowl,"theworldwouldgo rounda deal fasterthanit
does." (p. 84)

As Alice later discovers,the "baby" really is a pig, and thus one

would thinkAlice "ought" to have gleaned the lesson that names
attemptto arbitrarilyarrestthe phenomenal fluxby "pickingout"
as essential properties those that are perhaps characteristicof
merelyone stage of metamorphosisand, thus, are not then truly
"essential." Hence, the caterpillar'sprivilegedrole in this book is
to act as a counterpartof Alice: what is the "essence" of the being
we call, at merelyone stage of his metamorphosis,"caterpillar"?
Carroll later parodies this formof essentialistclassificationin the
156 NINETEENTH-CENTURY LITERATURE

Mock Turtle episode in which bodily "essences" come to be de-

fined in teleological fashion as meat for the table.
When Alice next invades the "Mad Tea-Party" to which, as
the March Hare reminds her, she was not invited,her problems
with "naming" multiplyas she attemptsto make sense of what
seems on the surface a quintessentiallyEnglish activity-the tea
party. However, the activityin which the Mad Hatter and com-
pany are engaged can only be yoked by violence to the English
conception. Once again Alice is oblivious to the few clues to the
meaning of the "creatures'" behavior that do come her way. As
occurs often in the historyof imperialism,however,the intruder
and natives do achieve at least a provisional sort of mutual ac-
commodationthatdisguises,at least temporarily,the factthatthey
live by completelydifferentsocial codes.
For instance,Alice is initiallypuzzled about the fact that the
table seems to be laid for a great number of guests,although only
the Hatter,Hare, and Dormouse are present.Yet the Hatteroffers
an explanation that seems to be provisionallyacceptable to both
the "creatures"and Alice:

"Well,I'd hardlyfinishedthefirstverse,"saidtheHatter,"when
the Queen bawled out 'He's murderingthe time! Off with his
head!' "
"How dreadfully savage!"exclaimedAlice.
"Andeversincethat,"the Hatterwenton in a mournful tone,
"he won'tdo a thingI ask! It's alwayssix o'clocknow."
A brightidea came intoAlice'shead. "Is thatthe reason so
manytea-things are put out here?"she asked.
"Yes,that'sit,"said theHatterwitha sigh:"it'salwaystea-time,
and we'veno timeto washthe thingsbetweenwhiles."
"Then you keep movinground,I suppose?"said Alice.
"Exactlyso,"said the Hatter:"as thethingsget used up."
"But whathappenswhenyou come to the beginningagain?"
Aliceventuredto ask.
"Supposewe changethesubject," theMarchHare interrupted,
yawning."I'm gettingtiredof this.I votethe youngladytellsus a
story." (pp. 99-100)

This passage casts interestinglighton Alice's problems of in-

terpretationfor the paradoxical reason that it seems to be one of
ALICE THE CHILD-IMPERIALIST 157
the few momentsin the textwhen Alice can findcommon ground
withthe "creatures."However,when she judges the Queen's order
"savage," she does so only after having made a leap across lin-
guistic levels of which she is oblivious. To judge the order "sav-
age," she mustinterpretthe statement"He's murderingthe time!"
figurativelyand the statement"Off with his head!" literally,yet
she gives no hintthatshe is aware she has made such a leap. Had
she read both literally,she would have been bound to hold the
Hatter in some sort of moral abhorrence, regardless of whether
she felthe was unjustlyserved by the Queen's order. (The Hatter's
later personificationof "Time" suggests he may well be justifiably
seen as a "murderer" in at least a provisional sense; like Alice,
though,the reader has no privilegedaccess to the Hatter's system
either.) Lacking a framework for interpretingthe "creatures"
words in their own way, she has no metalinguisticindicators to
help her decide when to take somethingliterallyor figuratively.
The one seeminglysuccessfulinferentialleap Alice makes in
thispassage-her determinationthatTime's decision to stand still
has frozen the Mad Hatter and March Hare into a perpetual tea-
time-is actuallya glaring example of the limitationsimposed by
her rigid conventionality:she "naturally"assumes that teatime is
determined by the position of the hands on the clock. A more
complex inferencemightbe that in a world of perpetual teatime,
there is no other time fromwhichteatimemaybe distinguished-
in effect,that there is no "time" in the English sense, since time
is an inferenceone ordinarilymakes fromchanging events.Alice
is the "illogical" one here (if one takes "illogical" to refer to her
being haunted by metaphysicalghosts) because she takes "time"
to be the groundingof eventsratherthan eventsto be the ground-
ing of time. Thus, the Mad Hatter's response that "it's alwaystea-
time,and we've no time to wash the thingsbetween whiles"might
well referto the lack of a servantnamed "Time" who will do the
dishes for them-at least potentiallya "reasonable" response from
one whose thinkingis not afflicted,as Alice's is, by the reified
metaphysicalentityshecalls "time."(It is an open question whether
or not the Hatter's "time"is a reifiedmetaphysicalentity,an actual
animate being or somethingelse entirely;the fewhintshe offers-
158 NINETEENTH-CENTURY LITERATURE

"If you knew Time as well as I do... you wouldn't talk about
wastingit. It's him" [p. 97]-raise more questions than they an-
swer.)
As the child in all of us, Alice must press on with her meta-
physical inquiries, seemingly unconscious of their metaphysical
nature. Having been told that the party moves on as the "things
get used up," she asks the question thatone eventuallyhears from
all children: "But what happens when you come to the beginning
again?" In one sense, the answer is death: the end of the chain
of nourishment,the end of the process of displacement. Yet the
March Hare's yawning response suggests that he has taken the
question in its most boringlytrivialsense: a question of the same
order as the child's query about the infiniteregress,"If God made
us, who made God?" It is unanswerable because it is a question
about a cyclical process cast in linear terms: a circle has no "be-
ginning."
Thus Alice findsherselfposing riddles that have no answers,
the very thing for which she reproached the Hatter earlier
(p. 97). The cyclical nature of her adventure in Wonderland-
pure metamorphosiswithouta telos,a process which denies her
the retrospective"knowledge" that closure brings-resembles the
way the societyof the Mad Hatter and March Hare "appears" to
her. As should be clear by now, Alice's quest to master the game
of Wonderland is doomed to failurebecause she willnever achieve
the kind of self-transcendencenecessary to "comprehend" (and
dominate) the "creatures." Her quest to learn the rules that will
"explain" their behavior-a "mastercode" which will provide the
key to understandingtheir behavior withoutitselfpresupposing
the categoriesof theirlanguage-is doomed to frustration.She is
bound to repeat the mistakesshe attributes,in her pigheaded way,
to them. Like any good imperialist,then, Alice assumes that be-
cause she comes to play a role in the "creatures'" drama by virtue
of her undismissiblepresence, she can therebydominate it, and
successfuldomination must be the inevitablereward of "compre-
hension." Of course, as has been certainlyclear from at least the
time of Freud, playing a role in a drama is preciselythat which
disqualifiesone fromofferinga useful interpretationof the mean-
ALICE THE CHILD-IMPERIALIST 159
ing of that drama, for that is the privilege of him who stands
Although Alice stands outside of the "creatures'" social
outside."3
system(or systems),she does not stand outside her own, which
she has instead elevated into a universalinterpretivesystemcalled
upon to explain all behavior everywhere.
Fittingly,the Hare's request for a story (a narrative might,
because it is finiteand linear,provide at least a provisionalclosure
to remove Alice and the "creatures" from their cyclicalstasis) is
picked up by the Dormouse, who begins to tell a tale that is ul-
timatelydisrupted by Alice's persistentquestioning. The Dor-
mouse's storyappears to take him across linguisticboundaries in
waysunacceptable to Alice: the pun on "drawing"sends him from
describinghow the "three littlesisters"were attemptingto "draw"
treacle froma well theywere "in,"to describinghow they"drew"
"everythingthat begins with an M" (pp. 102, 103). Whether this
storyis an "acceptable" tale or not cannot be judged withoutas-
suming the kind of universal perspectivethat Alice's convention-

13In his lecture of 1917 in Introductory

Lectureson Psycho-Analysis,
Part ILL, Vol.
16 of The CompletePsychologicalWorksof SigmundFreud, trans. and ed. James
Strachey,Standard ed., 24 vols. (London: Hogarth Press, 1953-74), Freud ac-
knowledges not only the existence but the therapeuticnecessityof transferential
relationshipsbetween doctor and patient. Acknowledging that once the doctor
comes to play an importantrole in the patient'sdrama(s), his abilityto influence
the patient's "intellectualbeliefs" (as opposed to the root cause of his illness) by
simple "suggestion"is greatlyenhanced. Freud argues that the doctor must work
to extracthimselfsufficiently from the transferenceso that he will eschew these
"easy" interpretive"successes" and draw the patient's conscious attentionto the
factthat he is playinga role in his drama: "We look upon successes thatset in too
soon as obstacles ratherthan as a help to the work of analysis; and we put an end
to such successes by constantlyresolvingthe transferenceon whichtheyare based.
It is this last characteristicwhich is the fundamentaldistinctionbetween analytic
and purely suggestivetherapy,and which frees the results of analysis from the
suspicion of being successes due to suggestion. In every other kind of suggestive
treatmentthe transferenceis carefullypreserved and left untouched; in analysis
it is itselfsubjected to treatmentand is dissected in all the shapes in which it
appears. At the end of an analytictreatmentthe transferencemustitselfbe cleared
away; and if success is then obtained or continues,it rests,not on suggestion,but
on the achievementby its means of an overcomingof internalresistances,on the
internal change that has been brought about in the patient" (p. 453). Thus the
analystmust rise "above" the transferentialrelationshipto the extentof bringing
it to the patient'sattentionand subjectingit to criticism.
160 NINETEENTH-CENTURY LITERATURE

ality leads her to believe she has always had. For instance,only
the conclusion of the tale (which, ironically,Alice ultimatelydis-
rupts) could cast retrospectivelight on the meaning of its ele-
ments.'4Thus the Dormouse casts his frustrationwith Alice's in-
terruptionsin the form of a sulky remark which, for all that,
forecastsAlice's role as the writerof her ownstoryin Wonderland:
"If you can't be civil, you'd better finishthe story for yourself"
(p. 101). What Carroll presentsin Alice is a world in which those
who cannot be "civil" have no choice but to "finish"the storyfor
themselves,but "finishing"here means "enacting" it, "playing it
out," ratherthan "telling"it froma safe preservebeyond the point
of closure.'5 Like the three sistersin the Dormouse's tale, Alice
lives at the bottomof the well out of which she is tryingto draw
treacle.

14Notethe privilegeHegel accords himselfin The Phenomenology ofMind: he is

the "Wise Man" because he writes at the "end" of history,comprehending the
deeds of the world-historicalfigure Napoleon. This is the privilegeof the inter-
preter of a narrative: beyond the point of closure, one can cast previous events
into meaningfulorder-as events "leading up to" the end-in Hegel's case, the
moment of writingthe Phenomenology. See Alexandre Kojeve, Introduction to the
ReadingofHegel, assembled by Raymond Queneau, ed. Allan Bloom, trans.James
H. Nichols, Jr. (New York: Basic Books, 1969), pp. 34-35. See the somewhat
analogous argument in Peter Brooks' "Repetition,Repression, and Return: Great
Expectations and the Study of Plot," New LiteraryHistory,11 (1980), 503-26. Ex-
amining Freud's BeyondthePleasurePrincipleas an implicitnarratologicaltreatise,
Brooks argues that the individual death (or the promise of the individual end)
has increasinglyassumed a privileged position as point of narrative closure:
"Freud's essay mayoffera model suggestiveof how narrativeboth seeks and delays
its end. In particular,his concept of repetitionseems fullypertinent,since repe-
titionof all sorts is the very stuffof literarymeanings, the basis of our creative
perception of relation and interconnection,the means by which we compare and
combine in significantpatternsand sequences, and thus overcome the meaning-
lessness of pure contiguity.In the narrativetext,repetitionconstitutesa return,a
calling-back,or a turning-back,which enables us to perceive similarityin differ-
ence, consequence in contiguity,metaphor in metonymy"(p. 512). This perspec-
tive also allows one, obviously,to sort out linguisticlevels, to "master" the game
by distinguishingthe figurativefrom the literal,metaphorical "execution" from
"real" execution. The various execution threatswhich pepper Alice appear to be
threatsto impose this kind of closure, although, significantly, the executions are
all deferred.
'5Note Derrida's identificationof Hegel's need to masterplay only by excluding
it (Jacques Derrida, "From Restrictedto General Economy: A Hegelianism without
Reserve,"in his Writingand Difference, trans.Alan Bass [Chicago: Univ. of Chicago
Press, 1978], p. 260).
ALICE THE CHILD-IMPERIALIST 161

In a sense, one can see Alice's "problem" as

a problem of living with the consequences that stem from her
livingin a "decentered" world: she must reestablish"precedence"
in all its senses for herself-temporal, spatial, political, and in-
terpretive-so that her own position as, impossibly,both master
in the master/slavedrama and Hegelian "Wise Man," who lives
beyond a point of closure outside of the "game," is preserved. She
must reestablishherself,in effect,in the center (which is also the
end).'6 Thus, throughouther adventures,Alice seeks to establish
temporal precedence (see, for instance,the trialat the end where
she insists on the "proper" order of "evidence to judgment to
sentencing"),spatial precedence (e.g., at the tea table and else-
where), political precedence (does the Queen actually have the
power to execute her?), in order, ultimately,to impose her own
"interpretive"precedence-the power of the interpreterto dom-
inate her material,the abilityto "manage" and "make sense out
of" unrulymatterby extractingherselffromthatwhichshe would
interpret,ultimatelyan assertion of the "primacy" of the inter-
preter over the mere material,the rightof Alice the child-impe-
rialistto impose a meaning on the behavior of the illogical "crea-
tures."
Ultimately,all of these formsof precedence are based on the
Hegelian epistemological model, which privileges the geometric
or "spatial" metaphor of "comprehension." To "comprehend" is
to metaphorically enclose within a field some matter that is
therebymade available to be "known,"or mastered.'7Alice stands

161n this context it is interestingto note an importantnecessitygoverningthe

Hegelian "Wise Man": he mustbe an atheist.On the other hand, as Kojeve argues,
Plato is bound to accept God because to deny the possibilityof the "Wise Man" is
to transformphilosophyinto theology(Introduction to theReading ofHegel, p. 91).
17EdwardW. Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978), has usefully
pointed to the importantimplicationsof this kind of knowledge of the exotic as
a kind of "framing"or "corralling": to enclose it, to delimit its boundaries, is to
"domesticate"it to an extent,to make it availableforthe person doing the framing.
Said writes: "Like Walter Scott's Saracens, the European representationof the
Muslim,Ottoman,or Arab was alwaysa wayof controllingthe redoubtableOrient,
and to a certain extent the same is true of the methods of contemporarylearned
162 NINETEENTH-CENTURY LITERATURE

"outside" of thatwhich she would masteronly in the limitedsense

that she does not share the social codes of the "creatures." How-
ever,that position-the privilegeof the alien-affords her no ad-
vantage here; in fact, it is her prime disadvantage. To play the
game withoutknowing the rules is to be played bythe game: to
be insidethe game while pretendingto "comprehend" it fromthe
outside.However, to be inside the game on these termsis to be at
the distinctdisadvantage that he who plays withoutknowingthe
rules experiences.18

Orientalists,whose subject is not so much the East itselfas the East made known,
and thereforeless fearsome,to the Western reading public" (p. 60).
18The play/work dichotomythatinformsJohan Huizinga's HomoLudens:A Study
of thePlay-Element in Cultureis recapitulated by Kathleen Blake in her discussion
of Lewis Carroll (play must be "spontaneous, disinterested,nonutilitarian";p. 18)
as well as by a number of other Carroll critics.The distinction,which mightseem
to carryall the weightyauthorityof "intuition,"is actuallya quite recentlycontrived
opposition that corresponds to the materialist/idealist metaphysicsunderpinning
the early industrialphase of Westerncivilization(Jacques Ehrmann, "HomoLudens
Revisited,"Yale FrenchStudies,No. 41 [1968], p. 46). In deconstructingHuizinga's
use of thisopposition in HomoLudens,Ehrmann makes the importantobservation
that the application of this distinctionto other cultures constitutesan ethnocen-
trismof the worstsort: "If play as the capacityfor symbolizationand ritualization
is consubstantialwithculture,it cannot fail to be presentwhereverthereis culture.
We realize then that play cannot be defined as a luxury. Whether their stomachs
are fullor empty,men play because theyare men. To say thatplay 'implies leisure'
is to set forth the problem while placing oneself in an ethnocentricperspective
that falsifiesthe basic data to be analyzed: it is to oppose the notion of work to
that of leisure (an opposition which carries withit all the others we have already
noted: utility-gratuitousness, seriousness-play,etc.). Such an opposition may be
valid in our society(and even there, less and less), but it certainlycannot be gen-
eralized to include cultures other than our own" (p. 46). Thus Blake's otherwise
fineanalysisof the Alicebooks in Play,Games,and Sportis flawedby her assumption
that it is possible to distinguishAlice's being "in the game" from being "outside
the game" and her "playing"the game from"being played by" the game (pp. 69-
70), as well as to distinguishthose momentswhen she mastersher experience by
incorporatingit from those when she is mastered or incorporated by it (pp. 18-
19). Alice,however,offersno such guideposts for its readers. As we have already
shown, not only does Alice subvert facilely ethnocentric distinctionsbetween
"game" and "life,"but, moreover,any attemptto exclude ritualfromthe discussion
of play and games in this text requires one to buy into a number of questionable
assumptions that Alice herself makes. Thus Blake is placed in the ethnocentric
position Ehrmann identifies:attemptingto read Alice by the categories inherited
fromthe very recent historyof the West,categories which the book itselfmaster-
fullycalls into question.
ALICE THE CHILD-IMPERIALIST 163
"The Queen's Croquet-Ground" chapter,then, is dominated
by Alice's attemptto gauge the power of the "savage" Queen, a
task at which she is unsuccessfulbecause of the ethnocentriccast
of her outlook: her knowledge is perfectlycircular in the sense
that it consistssolely in what she already knew before coming to
Wonderland, basically,the rules of the English game of "croquet"
and the officialpower of the King and Queen over life and death.
When she visitsthe Mock Turtle and the Gryphon, though, she
becomes involved in a wholesale questioning of the value of "ex-
planations" ("translations"might be a better word) over "repeti-
tions" that casts new lighton the tautologiesof the caterpillar(or
rather,wouldcast new light on it for Alice if she were capable of
processing it).
The Queen had earlier warned Alice (in an oblique way, of
course, guaranteed to go right over her head) that the "Mock
Turtle" is but a creature whose purpose it is to become a meal.
"It's the thing Mock Turtle Soup is made from" (p. 124). Not
surprisingly, when Alice meets the Mock Turtle and Gryphon,she
findsthem addicted to the same kinds of teleologicalexplanation
which she favors (albeit of an unfamiliarsort). In addition, the
Mock Turtle seems dissatisfied,as was Alice, withmere tale-telling;
he purports to want "explanation" cast in a metalanguage ("Ex-
plain all that"; p. 138).
Thus, it is not surprisingthat the beings about which they
discourse all seem to be creatureswhose "animal" existence is but
a prelude to theirultimateend as meals: theycan be "understood"
as "essentially"meals.'9 In fact,Alice even describes (unwittingly,
of course) the whitingas configuredin a way (tails in mouths; cf.
"tales" in mouths) that represents emblematicallythe circularity
of all her attemptsto find an explanatory metalanguage. As the
Mock Turtle so aptly puts it: "No wise fish would go anywhere
withouta porpoise" (p. 137). The mere factthat"eating"or "being
eaten" is the telosof most of the creaturesdiscussed suggeststhat
events in Wonderland have assumed a distinctively oral "Alicean"

19The oystersseduced by the Walrus in ThroughtheLooking-Glass are the best

Carrollian examples of creatures withwhomone discourses serving ultimatelyas
meals.
164 NINETEENTH-CENTURY LITERATURE

cast,a hermeneuticcirclefromwhichAlice willnever break free.20

Carroll's "obsession" with"orality"or oral formsof incorporation
here is his wayof workingout the visibleconsequences of the kind
of "imperialistic""recentering"in which Alice engages: to define
animals teleologicallyas meat for the table is but a thin disguise
for a process which "recenters"Alice at the "end" of the chain of
nourishment;for in Alice's universe, "meals" ultimatelyexist for
the purposeof being eaten by human beings like herself.2'
One of the other senses of "repetition"here must be under-
stood in opposition to "explanation"-reinscription in a different
language. However, Alice's confessed inabilityto "repeat" (every-
thing comes out "wrong,"i.e., different)is a sign of her inability
to close her own Hegelian circle and achieve "self-consciousness."
What she asks of herselfis "repetition";what she demands of the
"creatures" is "explanation." In both quests she is frustrated.In
the Mock Turtle, she meets a "creature"who throwsher own de-
mands back upon her: he "repeats" her own imperial high-hand-
edness. He is dissatisfiedwith her recitationof "Tis the voice of
the Lobster" (p. 139) because he is finallyonly interestedin "ex-
planation" (as Alice was dissatisfiedwith the caterpillar'smanner
of escaping her attemptto capture his meaning), but in reproach-
ing Alice for not casting her account in a language outside of the
language of the "original,"he insinuates that he takes a slightly
differentsense of "repetition":" 'What is the use of repeating all
that stuff,'the Mock Turtle interrupted,'if you don't explain it
as you go on?' " (p. 140). Thus he apparentlyignores the factthat
Alice, as she just "explained," cannot "repeat," and he does this
in order to distinguishhis sense of "explanation" frommere "rep-
etition"-tale-tellingor poetic recitation,regardlessof whetheror
not the teller has ever "told" the tale before.
Thus this ambiguityinherentin the term "repeat" (it means
both "recite" and "repeat," but is any poetic recitationever truly
a "repetition"of a previous recitation?)becomes a play on words.

20Nina Auerbach, "Alice and Wonderland: A Curious Child," VictorianStudies,

17 (1973), 36, has observed this about the book. She argues that Dinah the cat
functionsas the "personificationof Alice's own subtlycannibalistichunger."
210ne might speculate on a possible ethical motive for Carroll's famous anti-
vivisectionism:an attemptto preserve the "otherness"of the other,to keep it safe
fromappropriation for purely human purposes.
ALICE THE CHILD-IMPERIALIST 165
The interplaybetween Alice and the Mock Turtle returns their
discourse once again to the linguisticsurface, and Alice misses
another opportunityto read her differencefrom the "creatures"
out of the differingways in which each uses words. Ironically,
then, the Mock Turtle "appears" differentfrom Alice (and thus,
difficultto understand) for the paradoxical reason that he "ap-
pears" to be her repetition,the annoyinglyobtuse visitorcon-
stantlyin search of "explanation." In effect,the circularityof her
journey in Wonderland, a circularityguaranteed by the failureof
her powers of inference,places Alice in a position guaranteed to
feed her already prodigious megalomania. The Mock Turtle is
thus aptly named for his propensityto "mock" the alien intruder
by parodying her. More generally,Alice is incapable of drawing
the line between the mockerydirected at her and behavioral cus-
toms that have theirorigin in Wonderland but whichwe need not
necessarilysee as directed at her.
What I have implicitlybeen arguing is that the imperial at-
tempt to "know" is not stymiedby its inevitable failure; on the
contrary,the "failure" to know is itselfconverted into a "success-
ful" act of imperial appropriation through the imposition of a
discourse that,in circular fashion,finally"produces" the sought-
for objects of knowledge. However, it is necessarilyimportantto
distinguishthisformof recuperationfrom,say,a discoveryof the
ultimate commensurabilityof seemingly incommensurable dis-
courses,the kind of untenableclaim to universaltruthwhich"epis-
temology" makes, according to Rorty. Thus, Alice's "failure" to
"comprehend,"say, the game of Wonderland "croquet" is appro-
priated as a "success" of an imperial sort (albeit of the solipsistic
variety) when she "naturalizes" it as an English game that the
"creatures"merelyplay badly out of an "understandable" fear of
the Queen and out of an "incomprehensible"use of inappropriate
instruments(flamingosand hedgehogs rather than wooden mal-
lets and balls, as any good Englishman would use). As we have
already seen, other waysof accounting for the same appearances
are possible. The trial of the Knave of Hearts, then, extends this
process even further.Because, in Alice's view, the "creatures"
really "botch" the whole business of justice, they must be set
straightby her teaching them the rules for conducting "proper"
trials.Nevertheless,in the process of appropriatingthe Wonder-
166 NINETEENTH-CENTURY LITERATURE

land notion of "trial" to her own, Alice violentlyreinscribesthe

activityshe observes into her own conventional canon of prece-
dence, and, in consequence, makes herselfthe center ratherthan
the peripheryof the action: another solipsisticrecentering,which
ultimatelyappoints thisratherlimitedlittlegirlas judge, jury, and
executioner of all the "creatures."
That Alice's Wonderland adventure comes to a close with a
"trial" is only fitting,given the fact that the social ritual of the
trial holds an obviously preeminent place in the English system
of determiningtruth.The English "trial" is, above all, a linearly
structuredevent that produces truth retrospectivelyby closure:
when the accusation has been read, the evidence presented and
then weighed by the jury, and the sentence pronounced by the
judge, the trial is over and the truthis known.22The evidence is
presentedso thatthejury (or judge) can place it in a retrospective
order, enclose it in a field, and make it suitable for judgment.
Because the truthcannot be knownuntilall the evidence is in and
weighed, the truthcannot be given an accessible formuntil after
the point of closure. Ultimately,thisis but to say the obvious: that
judgment and guilt (as well as retrospectionitself)are necessarily
tied to a linear model of the unfoldingof events.
Not surprisingly,when the King follows the reading of the
accusation with what to Alice is a seeminglyperemptorycharge,
"Consider your verdict"(p. 146), she must assume the positionof
judge of thejudge in order to impose her own notion of "proper"
temporal precedence: firstaccusation, then presentationof evi-
dence, and, finally,judgment. This role of Alice's is reemphasized
later when, in the process of giving her testimony,she lectures
the King on the necessityof attachingthe "proper" label to the
"oldest rule in the book," "It ought to be Number One" (p. 156),

22See Dr. Johnson's antiplatonicdefinitionof juristic truth: "Sir, you [Boswell

the barrister]do not know it [the legal case he is arguing] to be good or bad till
the Judge determinesit. I have said that you are to state factsfairly;so that your
thinking,or what you call knowing,a cause to be bad, must be from reasoning,
must be from your supposing your arguments to be weak and inconclusive.But,
Sir, that is not enough. An argumentwhich does not convince yourself,may con-
vince the Judge to whom you urge it; and if it does convince him, why,then, Sir,
you are wrong,and he is right"(JamesBoswell,LifeofJohnson,ed. R. W. Chapman
[New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1980], p. 388).
ALICE THE CHILD-IMPERIALIST 167
which is another glaring instance of her own presumptuous ele-
vation of the merelyconventionalto the status of universal.
Once again, however,Alice's aggressive attempt to reshape
the Knave's "trial"in a way acceptable to her guarantees that she
will be unable to understand what is going on while insuringthat
her only possible response can be an aggressive one: in this epi-
sode a reduction of the "creatures" to a "mere" pack of two-
dimensional cards that, nevertheless, somehow unaccountably
have played her. Certainly,Alice is oblivious to the cultural sig-
nificanceof the eventonce again: what kind of "trial"is it in which
the guiltyparty is foreordained by a nurseryrhymecited at the
beginningand in which the allegedly "stolen" tartsare entered in
evidence because of the impossible fact that they haven't been
eaten? Like the Queen's "croquet-match,"this event bears the
signs of a predestined ritual rather than of an open-ended "con-
test" that can be decided only as it draws to a close.
Not surprisingly,it is the Hatter who is called as the first
"witness."When he entersthe courtroomcarryinghis everpresent
teacup stillfilledwithsome "unfinished"tea, we are reminded of
the endless (and beginningless)tea partywhich is simultaneously
a hintof the differencebetween Wonderland and nineteenth-cen-
turyEngland as well as a sign of the hermeneuticcircle in which
Alice is caught. In giving his "evidence," the Hatter is asked to
performwhat seem to be the usual acts of retrospectionthatAlice
would "naturally"expect of a witness.His testimony,however,is
a brilliantdefeat of the verynotion of "testimony,"and, afortiori,
retrospection:not only does he never succeed in re-presenting
what the March Hare and Dormouse "said" (pp. 148-49), but he
punctuates his account by returningagain and again to the banal
events of his everydaylife (drinkingtea, butteringbread), events
which are notable only for theirunhistoricity, singularonly in the
unsingularwaytheyrepeat themselvesendlessly,markingthe cycli-
cal repetitivenessof his static,undifferentiated,tea-partylife (as-
suming, perhaps unfairly,that the Hatter's account is governed
by an imperativeto render his "life,"rather than by some other
alien discursive imperative that has nothing to do with such a
task). The Hatter ironicallydemonstratesthe link between history
and retrospectionby subvertingthe latter: asked to "remember,"
he can only dredge up a litanyof the same.
168 NINETEENTH-CENTURY LITERATURE

The various threatsof execution that pepper the book thus

"appear" to be futileattemptsto impose a closure on the otherwise
cyclicalevents,a closure thatwould generate meaning by enabling
a retrospectivesorting: precisely the kind of "closure" Alice so
avidlyseeks. Thus when the King threatensexecution forthe Hat-
ter's poor powers of retrospection-"You must remember . . . or
I'll have you executed" (p. 149)-he suggests,in inverted form,
thatexecution,the closure of death, is preciselywhatwould enable
the retrospectiveimpositionof meaning: precipitatingthe Hatter
out of his cyclicallife of endless repetition,of endless substitution
of teacup for teacup. As we have already seen, however,none
of the Wonderland execution threatscarries performativeforce.
Thus it is left to Alice to perform a final "execution" of all the
"creatures"by reducing them to "only" a pack of cards, a violent
closure which, ironically,merely shufflesthem rather than sorts
them out and assigns them a meaning. The ending precipitates
Alice out of the "creatures'" universewhiledenyingher the power
to "frame"her experience in a meaningfulway(although she does
"recuperate"it as the pure dross of a "dream"), a "framing"power
which is ostensiblythe boon granted to one who steps "outside."
The price she pays for stepping out of the "card game" in which
she was somehow played is the inabilityto "make sense" of the
game.
The final chapter,then, merely leaves Alice enclosed within
her own ethnocentricsystemwhile suggestingthat the Wonder-
land ritual of the trial followsrules quite differentfromany that
Alice has ever heard. The debate over the origin of the verses
that are entered as evidence (are they the Knave's? they neither
bear his signaturenor are inscribedin his handwriting)underlines
the impossible hermeneutic task faced by any representativeof
Western civilizationwho wishes to actually "understand" what is
going on here. For one thing, the question of precedence is in-
troduced immediatelyby the Rabbit'squestion, "Where shall I be-
gin. . . ?" The King's banal response-"Begin at the beginning...
and go on till you come to the end: then stop" (p. 158)-imme-
diatelycalls attentionto the purely conventionalstatus of a man-
ner of reading that would seem necessarily"natural" and "uni-
versal." For Alice to make such a statementwould be taxing the
limitsof our readerlypatience by having her render a truism;for
ALICE THE CHILD-IMPERIALIST 169
the King to say it, though,is to suggest both that he has assumed
the Mock Turtle's role as a parodic "repetition"of Alice the "priv-
ileged" interpreterand that,perhaps, such a statementis actually
necessarybecause it is notself-evidentto the "creatures"attending
at the ritual (or, possibly,that the ritual nature of the event ren-
ders all statementsmade withinit purelyincantatory).Given what
we know of the "circular" appearance of events in Wonderland,
the King's words mightwell be taken as a novel prescriptionfor
properly unfolding "evidence" (or the King's lunacy might well
be ignored by the others as a proformagesture of respect for his
symbolicrole).
The verses themselvesare interestingbecause of the way in
which they seem to defeat all attemptsto attributemeaning to
them. Their deictic indeterminacyundermines attemptsto recu-
perate their meaning by referring the pronouns to actual beings
while simultaneouslytemptingthe reader to constructan inter-
pretationof them that would account for the factthat theyseem
to be about circulationand appropriation, importantthemes in
thischapter and elsewhere. The seeminglyarbitrarywayin which
ownershipof the verses is assigned to the Knave despite the lack
of proper "Alicean" evidence is echoed in the words, "They all
returned from him to you, / Though they were mine before"
(p. 158). Insofar as the verses have any meaning, they seem to
have somethingto do with circulationand ownership,which are
privileged themes here because, from Alice's point of view, the
Knave can only be condemned on the evidence of the verses if
his ownershipof them can be proven. Nevertheless,the possibility
of assigningthe referenceof one pronoun to the Knave is doubt-
ful,given the factthat the verses themselvesfloatin a deicticfree
space.
When the King then proceeds to gloss the verses, he does so
not because it mattersto the prosecution of the case ("If there's
no meaning in it . . . that saves a world of trouble,you know,as
we needn't tryto find any"; p. 159) but because such an effortis
its own reward-for obscure reasons. In this,he recapitulatesAl-
ice's own hermeneuticeffortwith similar results: the verses are
pressed into service of the King's intentionof condemning the
Knave by being shown to implythat the returnof the tartsto the
Queen is evidence of the Knave's guilt (p. 160). Once again, the
170 NINETEENTH-CENTURY LITERATURE

cyclical nature of Alice's hermeneuticadventure is recapitulated

in the "creatures'" own tautologicalenterprises.
The return to the frame at the end of the book provides a
rather ambiguous closure. Alice's sister substitutesherself for
Alice and recapitulates the Wonderland adventures in her own
dream, although with an important difference: in Coleridgean
fashion,she only "halfbelieved herselfin Wonderland,"aware that
she would eventuallyawaken to a "dull reality"(p. 163). But this
awakening promises a metamorphosisthat is a teleological devo-
lution: the "rattlingtea-cups" degenerated into "tinklingsheep-
bells,"the "Queen's shrillcries" declined into merelythe "voice of
the shepherd boy," the odd Wonderland noises settled into the
form of the dull because overly familiar farmyard "clamour"
(p. 163). It is hard to miss here both the note of Romantic nos-
talgia for a lost experience of youth as well as the anti-Romantic
repudiation of the sublimityof the pastoral: the sisterawakening
fromthe vivid complexityof Alice's dream into the dull "reality"
of Wordsworth'srural visions.
Ultimately,Alice'sAdventures in Wonderlandtraces the defeat
of the diachronic formof comprehensionthat Hegel's philosophy
envisions,and it does so in a way that constitutesone of the cen-
tury's greatest comic critiques of its ethnocentricpremises. Be-
cause Alice failssuccessfullyto framethe eventsof her adventure,
she mustflee what has become a nightmare,although that"night-
mare" is already being recuperated (by her sisterat the end) as a
wonderful dream more vivid than the dull life (which is really
nothing but boring pastoral narrative anyway) "outside" that
dream. One could observe that Alice's inabilityto capture in her
words to her sister the nightmarishquality of her Wonderland
adventures encourages that sister to recuperate the narrativeof
the dream in a way that clearly falsifiesit by sugarcoatingit, by,
in effect,practicinga bit of Alice's own high-handed imperial re-
constructionon us readers-another insidious kind of repetition
that by now can be seen for what it is. In this sense Carroll may
be absolved of the crime forwhichhe has oftenbeen condemned:
the so-called "crime" of attemptingto insulate his readers from
the far-reachinglessons of Alice's Wonderland dream by con-
structinga frame narrativethat deliberatelytrivializesit. If any-
thing, by suggesting that the frame is reconstructingthe Won-
ALICE THE CHILD-IMPERIALIST 171
derland dream under the guise of recapitulatingit, Carroll drives
home the "lesson" that there is a bit of the imperial Alice in all
of us who engage in the twinactivitiesof both "comprehending"
and "repeating."

BrownUniversity